Artist/ Band: Roger Powell
Title: Blue Note Ridge
Label: Unicorn Digital
Year of Release: 2009
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The Review:

With Blue Note Ridge, Utopia keyboardist and solo composer Roger Powell returns with another album on the heels of Fossil Poets. While that album was a return to instrumental progressive rock, Blue Note Ridge, another original recording, counters its predecessor's carefully layered electronic sound with an immediacy and intimacy tapped by way of improvisational acoustic piano. Suitelike in its delivery and with deliberately more in common with Windham Hill than Wounded Bird, this recording is ripe with subtleties and deft shadings uncommon to run-of-the-mill solo piano releases. Parts of Ridge are melodic, and other parts are more ambient in nature, but never static, so to speak. Powell, who cut his teeth in one of prog's most well-known crossover acts, and before that gained renown with a landmark album of electronic music recorded exclusively with ARP's then state-of-the-art modular synthesizers, isn't one prone to extended sustain, or breves. "Blue In Grey," "Ghost Ripples," "Water Shed" and the opening piece, "Path To The River," all demonstrate, among others, the composer's flair for taste and articulation. Blue Note Ridge is devoid of Powell's penchant for electronics but is an altogether different animal and his enthusiasts owe it a spin or two.

Reviewed by Elias Granillo Jr. on July 23rd, 2010

Tracks:

01. Path To The River
02. Blue In Grey
03. Blue Note Ridge
04. Take To The Sky
05. Snowfall
06. Green Shaft
07. Flint Hill
08. Peace and Quiet
09. Ghost Ripples
10. Shadow of Pines
11. Valley Fog
12. First Light
13. Still Point
14. Watershed

Reviewed Discography

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